


Echo

by 13lackbirds



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Cuddling, Developing Relationship, Doomed Timelines, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Mentioned Past Character Death, Near-Death Experience, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 12:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12232494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13lackbirds/pseuds/13lackbirds
Summary: After an encounter with a witch goes unexpectedly awry, Kyouko's head isn't working the way it should.





	Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [failsafe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/gifts).



> This is set sometime fairly late in Homura's quest, after enough timelines have gone by for Madoka (and others) to start having weird dreams and deja vu. I wanted to play around with the idea of a near-death experience causing Kyouko to temporarily realize that things are not as they should be, but not be able to fully grasp the extent to which things have gone wrong since she is still trapped in a timeline that's doomed to fail.

(Later, she looks back and thinks how ridiculously stupid it is that it’s a familiar that nearly does her in. A cast-off from a dying witch, something she wouldn’t bother looking at twice if she saw it chasing someone else.

Later, Sayaka gives her a half-nasty laugh and says, _I told you so,_ as if the whole ordeal wasn’t her fault in the first place.)

 _Now,_ she and Homura are taking down a witch, everything going smoothly between the two of them. Many hands make light work, and Homura is a real pro, gunfire blazing, moving so fast between strikes that it’s like she can teleport. The witch itself is nothing complicated - a rotten tree with serpents blooming in place of leaves. It hasn’t eaten too many people yet, but Homura had insisted on taking it down and Kyouko hadn’t minded a chance to flex this new partnership.

The witch screams when Kyouko’s blade slices through its arm, the nest of snakes that it has in place of a head hissing and writhing in the air. Kyouko dashes back, suspended in the air on her own magic, effortlessly avoiding the poison it spits from its fangs.

Something blue zips past in the corner of her eye. She turns to look as Sayaka crashes directly into the center of the mass of serpents, swords flashing.

“Hey!” Kyouko snarls. The witch is dying, its core torn to shreds under Sayaka’s blade, but this isn’t the way things were supposed to go. It’s her prey - well, hers and Homura’s, and this insolent brat can’t just come barrelling in with no warning.

Kyouko braces herself and lunges toward Sayaka, vaulting her way up the rotting wood of the witch’s already-disintegrating torso. And then the familiar pops out of a hole in the hollow trunk, right in front of her.

It looks like a pop-up book version of a snake, bright yellow and striped like a bee, cheery and childish-looking. Kyouko watches its jaw unhinge comically wide in what feels like slow motion. She steps back, knowing already that it’s not enough, and feels the singe of its teeth graze the very edge of her dress - and then the rest of its body comes after, too wide to avoid, smashing her against the wall so hard she feels something burst in her chest.

A supernova goes off in Kyouko’s brain. She can’t see anything but red. She tries to tell her limbs to move, to send an arc of magic underneath her so she can catch herself, but it doesn’t work.

She hears her spear clatter to the ground a half second before her body hits the concrete, and then nothing.

 

-

 

Darkness, warmth, and a heartbeat against her ear.

Kyouko drifts, close enough to consciousness to see the light filtering through the waves, but not close enough to break the surface tension. Images float in and out of her head, contextless - a splash of blood; a witch as tall as a building with a dress full of gears like a clock; a mermaid; an apple; an angel. None of them make any sense, so she lets them go.

Dark swims in again.

For a moment, she feels the way she used to feel when she prayed in bed at night. Warm, safe. She's forgotten the words but the meaning is still there - an embrace made of pure light, a pair of hands offering help.

Then she wakes up, and a corpse is holding her down.

Kyouko screams for her mother before she can stop herself.

The body pressing her to the bed flails back with a squawk, blue hair flying. It's Sayaka.

Looking at her shocked expression and realizing that Sayaka has just learned something about her that Kyouko never wanted to reveal fills Kyouko with rage. She throws off the blanket that’s smothering her and tries to summon her spear and her magical girl outfit but her head is still woozy, everything knocked off-kilter. Instead she only comes up with a length of chain and one segment of pipe, which for some reason feels like it weighs as much as the whole earth. She lunges for Sayaka but falls short, her vision swimming. Her teeth chatter and her hands shake. "What did you do to me?" she slurs.

Sayaka bristles. "I saved your life!"

Kyouko opens her mouth to snap back, but her voice dies as a sheet of white-hot pain rips up her spine, stopping her breath. She sees Sayaka's eyes widen in alarm, and then she can't see anything.

There's a noise like TV static in her ears. When it fades she can distantly hear someone making wet noises - desperate, gagging sobs.

There are hands on her back, soothing. Kyouko whimpers, and then realizes the sounds are coming from her.

"Don't move too fast," Sayaka says sharply. "I did my best but there's only so much I can do in one sitting. And you lost a lot of blood."

Kyouko slowly realizes that the darkness in front of her eyes is the comforter, which she's lying facedown on. She doesn't remember how that happened. She turns her head, haltingly - her neck feels like her spine's been replaced with rusty scrap metal, grating on itself - and blinks into soft blue-white light. She squints, even though it doesn't hurt her eyes.

The streams of light are thin as spider's silk, with little music notes caught in them. As Kyouko stares, the notes move past her eyes in a wide arc. She realizes that it's the edge of a large circle of magic, the midpoint of which is somewhere behind Kyouko's back.

Sayaka is healing her.

Kyouko catalogs that information, examines the tangled snare of emotions bubbling in her chest, and then carefully dismisses all of it as trivial. Still, it takes a lot of effort to get her jaw and throat to cooperate enough to talk, and her voice doesn’t come out as snide or abrasive as she’d hoped. "This is why I'm here?"

"Yes." Sayaka's voice is smooth the way the surface of a vat of acid is smooth.

“This is your house?”

“No, it’s Homura’s apartment. It was closer, and my parents - you were a mess, they would have freaked out. We brought you here, I stayed to watch because she’s taking Madoka home…” Sayaka trails off, and the light fades. Kyouko is immediately cold again except for the skin directly under Sayaka’s hands, but her shivering is less painful now, the broken-glass feeling in her back almost completely gone, like the remnant of a bad dream.

Homura. That explained how spare the walls looked and how rigid the mattress was - the room was as ascetic as its owner. “Huh. I didn’t think Homura would be one to stick around for someone wounded badly enough to drag her down,” Kyouko says.

Sayaka is quiet for a moment, then says, “She’s hard to understand. She was - upset, she wanted you to be okay, but also...I really don’t think she wanted Madoka to see you die. Especially...after Mami-san...”

 _I should be dead._ The thought is so sudden and certain that feels like it comes from someplace outside herself - she’s never wanted to die, not even after her parents and Momo were ki-- No, Kyouko’s goal is to live, and thrive; she has no time for that kind of thinking. But there it is, a morbid conviction that only grows the more she thinks about it.

Something else is bothering her, but the certainty that she shouldn’t be alive right now has her rattled enough it takes her what feels like years to determine what it is. Finally she arrives at it. "Why didn't _you_ leave me?"

Sayaka does take her hands away then. "What kind of hero would I be if I did something like that?" she says sullenly.

Kyouko grins humorlessly into the blanket. "I bet you _wanted_ to."

"Shut up." There's no fire in her voice, though. Instead she sounds exhausted.

Something in her tone makes anxiety suddenly froth up in Kyouko, intense enough to make her hands twitch and just as nonsensical as her earlier thought about death. God, she is starving. She sits up as best she can and turns to look at Sayaka - really look at her for the first time since she woke up - and blinks.

Sayaka’s school uniform is neat as ever, but the girl herself looks like she’s been hit by a truck. The circles under her eyes are so dark they look like bruises, and there are angry welts and bruises in various states of healing mottled up and down her legs. Her fingers are covered in scrapes and stained faintly with blood. There’s another smear of blood at the hinge of Sayaka’s jaw, and the edge of her hair is clotted with it.

“It's no good to walk around like that," Kyouko says numbly. "Not when you've got healing magic."

Sayaka looks down at herself as if she'd forgotten the fact that her entire body is covered in old wounds, then shrugs. The motion seems delayed, like it’s almost too much energy for her. "No point. I can't feel it anyway."

“Don’t be stupid, you’re covered in blood!”

Sayaka grins at her, a glimmer of mean triumph in her eyes. “It’s not _mine_. I told you, you were bleeding everywhere. You should have seen my cape...”

Oh.

Self-consciousness is something Kyouko had sworn to stamp out of herself a long time ago, the same way she’d successfully stamped out her concern for others and belief in God, but the thought of what she must look like if Sayaka is that much of a mess fills her with cold horror. She’s supposed to be completely self-sufficient, but instead she’s trembling like a baby in a stranger’s bed, kept alive on the kindness of another stranger who’s sworn to hate her, after proving herself colossally stupid enough to have to rely on a rookie to keep her from getting shredded by a familiar - stupid, stupid -

She wishes she had something to bite.

Another thought swims to the front of Kyouko's mind. "The witch. Did you use its grief seed?"

Stony silence. Sayaka looks away.

Kyouko wants to snap at her for being a reckless idiot, but the anxiety from before is getting worse. Sayaka’s stupid powers must have scrambled her brain. Kyouko digs in her jacket pocket, summoning some of her own magic to open the little fold of reality she’d hidden away in there ages ago, and pulls a grief seed out of the rift in space, wishing fervently that she’d thought to store a candy bar in there, too. She brandishes the seed at Sayaka, who rolls her eyes. "Take it."

"I didn't save you to get a reward," Sayaka snarls.

“Oh, shut up and take it, Miki.”

Sayaka is suddenly crowding back into Kyouko’s personal space, her fists clenched so hard her knuckles look ready to pop through her bruised skin. Kyouko doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. “I don’t want your reward,” Sayaka says, her voice low and flat. “I don’t want to be like you.”

Kyouko’s arm is too heavy to keep holding the seed out, so she lets her hand rest on the bed, keeping her fingers open. "You didn't save me for a reward, but so what if I reward you anyway? A token of thanks? Isn't that noble or whatever?"

"Don't mock me."

"I'm not." She isn't. A half-formed memory is stirring in the back of Kyouko's mind, like something emerging from clouds of silt at the bottom of a river. She can't see through the murk, and she can't guess what it is - all she knows is that it’s important for her to avoid it. A bolt of inspiration strikes her. "If you take it I'll help you kill familiars."

Sayaka blinks and leans back, caught off guard. "That's not a good reason to do that."

"Who cares? It'll be saving people, in any case. Isn't that what you want?" Kyouko smiles. "You're a good girl, Sayaka, maybe you can be a good influence on me."

And Sayaka - blushes, and looks at Kyouko in appalled horror, and stammers. Kyouko blinks at her, not sure what just happened, but before she can say anything Sayaka huffs and snatches the grief seed out of Kyouko’s trembling fingers like she’s pissed off at the fact that it exists in the first place. When she clinks it against her muddied soul gem it takes nearly half a minute for all the murk to drain away.

Watching the black swirling out of Sayaka’s soul gem makes Kyouko suddenly exhausted. She should probably clean her own gem...she should probably get up and raid Homura's cabinets before the other girl comes back to kick her out...she remains on the bed. "There you go," she says, closing her eyes. "I forgive you for stealing my kill, by the way."

Sayaka scoffs, but she already sounds stronger. It makes Kyouko's heart leap, for some reason she can't identify. "You're _welcome_ ," Sayaka says, "for saving you."

"Yeah, yeah," Kyouko says. "That was handy. Maybe you're not a hopeless case after all. Anyway, we need to get you fully trained in killing witches if we're going to help Homura with..." Kyouko trails off, her brow furrowed.

"What about Homura?"

The reason she and Homura are teaming up, something about a clock, a stage, a tree as big as the world...but that doesn’t make any sense, because Homura hasn’t told her why she’s so determined to work together. Maybe Kyouko dreamed it. "I don't know."

Sayaka sighs, but not in an angry way. "Go back to sleep," she says. “You nearly died. You’re not thinking right.”

Kyouko gets up, very slowly - she's still stiff, little prickles of pain stabbing her unexpectedly - and pulls the blankets back so she can worm her way under Homura's comforter. She does flinch, just a little, when Sayaka reaches out and unexpectedly draws the fabric up around her face. She's still cold, shaking a little, but not the deep bone-wracking shivers and clattering teeth from before.

Looking up at Sayaka’s worn face, feeling the other girl’s hands smooth over the blanket, a thought occurs to her. “Wait,” Kyouko says. “When I woke up. What were you doing?”

Sayaka shrugs, looking embarrassed. "You were cold to the touch...all gray. Shaking. The blankets didn’t help... Like I said, you lost a lot of blood."

That thought again: not _I could have died_ , but _I should be dead_. There’s a puzzle piece that’s missing there, but Kyouko shoves it into the back of her mind, another thing to bury and forcibly forget. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Sayaka echoes.

"You were holding me," Kyouko says.

"Sleep," Sayaka says again.

Kyouko does doze, after a while. And when, after a while, she feels the bed dip behind her, an arm curl around her over the comforter, and a pair of knees fit themselves against the back of her legs, she methodically smothers down the voice in her head that whimpers safe, home, please stay, and she says absolutely nothing.


End file.
